About

Jesus Radicals is a collaborative effort: our site is run by a team of organizers that work to maintain a reader-submitted webzine, the Iconocast podcast, and the “People’s Library” (a growing collection of resources related to the intersection of Christian faith and radical politics).

Our primary focus is on undoing oppressions from a framework of anarchist politics and liberative Christianity. We explore the practical implications of of a Jesus-centered life and how that way of life may benefit from a critical engagement with anarchist political stances (defined broadly as a commitment to critique of all forms of domination). To that end, we make content available in various mediums that explains a variety of anarchist stances on issues including (but not limited to) economics, racism, heteropatriarchy, decolonization, policing, and war. And, since our place within creation is largely ignored within Christian theology and classical anarchist politics, we explore our relationship with the environment, as well as human relationships with non-human animals.

﻿History﻿

Jesus Radicals is a network of Christians who are also anarchists. The website began in 2000 as a way to communicate a group of evangelical college students’ experiences being arrested at the School of the Americas, where the U.S. trains assassins. Nekeisha and Andy were the primary people behind the site at the time, and after it outlived its usefulness for that protest, we morphed the site into primarily a library of out-of-print works of Jacques Ellul along with a discussion forum.

In 2003, as a response to our Mennonite congregation’s discussions of Christianity and politics, Nekeisha and Andy helped organize the site’s first anarchism and Christianity conference in New York City. But instead of a local congregational discussion, the gathering turned into something that people came from as far as the Midwest to attend. Since the initial gathering, yearly conferences were organized up until 2013 where the connections between anarchism and Christianity were discussed among a growing network of anarchist identify. The conference has been on an indefinite hiatus since 2013 due to the amount of energy required to organize.​In 2010, Mark Van Steenwyk proposed that the work he and a few others were doing at www.jesusmanifesto.com could be united into the Jesus Radicals website. Beginning in 2007, Jesus Manifesto was a multiple-editor webzine that focused particularly on the anti-imperial nature of the Gospel. In effect this meant taking the best of Jesus Manifesto’s reader driven essays and innovative interviews with leading activists and theologians and combining it with Jesus Radicals’ static content, discussion forums and annual conferences. This also means that Jesus Radicals shifted beyond a website ran solely by Nekeisha and Andy.

﻿Who We Are﻿

Nekeisha Alayna Alexis, Brett Gershon, and Joanna Shenk currently share the responsibilities of organizing and maintaining the website.

Nekeisha and Joanna host and co-produce the Iconocast: a monthly podcast exploring the way of Jesus in the Empire. Nekeisha and Seth Martin host the Iconocast Canvas, which is a podcast platform for artists to discuss how their art connects with work for justice, liberation, and social reconstruction. ​

As a network, rather than an organization, Jesus Radicals has no membership, no dues or fees. We are people who sometimes live close to one another, sometimes far apart, but who stay connected both on and offline and have a broadly shared commitment to anarchic Christian faith.